Tupper Lake village board rejects bid for former trailer park lot

June 26, 2012

TUPPER LAKE - The village rejected the first bid it got on a lot that used to be a trailer park, two years after it started soliciting bids.

The Woulf Avenue lot is one of two the village seized in fall 2009 after the former owners of the trailer park there failed to pay their taxes.

The two lots were originally offered for people to bid on them in 2010.

After no one bid and the properties were offered up for a second bid offering, the Tupper Lake Christian Center submitted a bid for the front lot for $30,850, a deal they are working on completing now. The group plans to build a church on the property and sell their current Park Street location.

After several attempts to get bids on the back lot of the former trailer park, local businessmen Rick Reandeau and Mike Vaillancourt offered $16,000 last week for the property. The minimum bid was $30,000.

Reandeau went to a village board meeting last week to explain to trustees that the two want to build storage facilities on the lot, similar to the buildings he put on his own Main Street lot in recent years. He said they would probably construct one building a year on the Woulf Avenue starting next year, going for three years.

They would buy the property cheaper than the village was hoping to get for it, but they would end up paying more taxes on it once it was developed into a business, Reandeau said.

"It just makes no sense to me," Vaillancourt told the Enterprise this morning.

Vaillancourt said the village will now put the property out to bid again, which costs about $400 or $500 each time.

But trustees seemed firmly against taking any less than their minimum bid on the property at last week's village board meeting.

The village board, under former Mayor Mickey Desmarais, has in the past spoken out against building storage areas in the village. At last week's meeting, trustees recalled that they had put restrictions on the property when they took control of it. Village Clerk Mary Casagrain said the restrictions only banned the property from being used as a gas or auto service station, a mobile home lot or a place for storage of mobile homes.